20 May 2025: MINTAG is back in the field!

The 2025 MINTAG tagging season has officially begun, with Japan being the first partner country to head out today!

The MINTAG project is an international scientific project between the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, Japan, and Norway.  Working to develop small satellite tags so that we can track fast-swimming whales, like fin, minke, pilot and sei whales, more effectively and learn more about where they spend time during the winter, how they move, and how they respond to their environment.

Although the project is still in development, some exciting results came in from the 2024 tagging efforts:

• A minke whale tagged in northern Norway was tracked for 231 days, making its way all the way to the Caribbean. This is one of the longest minke whale satellite tracks in the North Atlantic!
• Another tag on a fin whale in Svalbard sent data for 195 days, showing the whale travelling south of the Azores and the Iberian Peninsula.
• An Icelandic minke whale was tracked for 109 days. After spending some time around Iceland, it made its way to the Azores.

Last year’s promising results bode well for this summer’s tagging efforts, and you can be part of it by following the whales on the site! https://mintag-project.com/follow-the-whales/